We power the Microsoft Cloud

As the engine that powers Microsoft's cloud services, the Cloud Infrastructure and Operations group focuses on smart growth, high reliability, operational excellence, cost-effectiveness, environmental sustainability, and a trustworthy online experience for customers and partners worldwide.

Microsoft has been building and managing datacenters for over 25 years. Today, the company’s cloud-scale datacenters provide the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for its 200-plus online services, including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive and Microsoft Azure. The infrastructure is comprised of a large global portfolio of more than 100 datacenters, 1 million servers, content distribution networks, edge computing nodes, and fiber optic networks. This portfolio is built and managed by a team of experts working 24x7x365 to support services for more than 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses, in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Microsoft is committed to a robust process for resource acquisition, energy consumption, incident management, service support, research and development, and change management across its resources. The datacenter operation’s leaders hold more than 600 U.S. technology patents and have a combined total of more than 575 years of industry experience. Their backgrounds include expertise in industrial, electrical and mechanical engineering, power and cooling architecture, research and development, security, privacy and compliance, and business operations and administration.

Cloud-scale datacenters

Delivering services at cloud-scale requires a radically different approach to designing and operating datacenters. When software applications are built as distributed systems, every aspect of the physical environment–from server design to the building itself–creates an opportunity to drive systems integration for greater reliability, scalability, efficiency, and sustainability.

Cloud operations and reliability

Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion in building a highly scalable, reliable, secure, and efficient datacenter infrastructure. Cloud services are supported 24x7 with a robust incident management process. With one of the world’s largest networks, Microsoft’s cloud provides more than 3 terabits per second capacity to more than 2,000 networks.

Designing cloud servers

How are our cloud servers different? It begins with scale. From the number of customers supported to the number of servers configured, deployed, managed, and secured—the scale required to support our cloud services is several orders of magnitude beyond a traditional IT deployment. Find out how we design servers that are optimized for multiple cloud workloads, the benefits of resilient software architecture on hardware requirements, and how we are sharing these best practices with the industry at large.

Datacenter sustainability

Microsoft is committed to driving innovations in our datacenters to improve efficiency and sustainability. Our goal is to reduce the impact of our operations and products, help other organizations reduce their impact, and help drive industry best practices for environmental sustainability.

We are excited to share some of our recent research projects that are radically changing the way computational power is delivered and improving sustainability for the industry as a whole.